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In South Florida, Tropical Bohemia in the Makings

ON a balmy November night here, Rachel Goodrich was playing to a rapt moonlit crowd in a courtyard of Churchill’s Pub. She had her red cowboy hat, her percussionist with a mix of blocks, bells and toys, her band of skilled players who are so tight they’re loose, and her kazoo. The ramshackle space in the Little Haiti neighborhood was full of fans and fellow musicians, who sang along with Ms. Goodrich’s gin-clear voice as she led her band through the kind of controlled hootenanny that has made her the queen of the Miami indie rock scene. She is the Feist-like jewel of a town more known for machined bass, booty and beats than for handcrafted songs.

“Rachel has everything: the band, the look, the sound,” said Nick Scapa, 25, a local musician and one of several young entrepreneurs trying to put Miami on the musical map. Ms. Goodrich, 24, was the most buzzed-about act at a benefit for Hear Miami, an organization dedicated to spreading the word about the region’s burgeoning music. For a city without much of an indie scene, there was an excitement level at Churchill’s that felt like Toronto or San Francisco or Boston. Except with that brilliant Miami moon.

Thanks to talents like Ms. Goodrich, Miami’s reputation as a dead zone for live music may be changing. A spate of CDs by Miami artists, propelled by local promoters and backed with national tours, are poised to raise the city’s profile. Ms. Goodrich released “Tinker Toys,” her charming debut album, on her own Yellow Bear label in October. Rough Guide has compiled the independent CDs by the Spam Allstars, the Latin-funk band that is a veteran of the international festival circuit. Jacob Jeffries, a 20-year-old pianist, bandleader and singer-songwriter, is recording the final disc of a trilogy. And record labels and music publishers are starting to pay attention.

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Rachel Goodrich, a kind of queen of the Miami indie rock scene, at Churchills Pub in the citys Little Haiti neighborhood. Its so real, its old, and its magical, Ms. Goodrich said of the pub.Credit
Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times

Miami is “striving to find an independent music scene,” said Barbara Cane, vice president and general manager for writer and publisher relations at BMI, who is working with Mr. Jeffries. “It’s going to take one little person like Jacob to open doors to all those other Jacobs down there.”

The indie music scene is also getting a lift from the increasing international visibility of Miami’s creative class. This week tens of thousands of art makers and appreciators will descend on the city for the annual Art Basel Miami Beach, the fair that vaulted the region’s fertile visual arts to world-renowned status. At some of those parties the jet set will be serenaded by the newest exponents of this growing tropical bohemia, bands with jazz-school pedigrees and hybrid sounds: the punk-soul of Awesome New Republic (better known as ANR), the electro bliss of Airship Rocketship and the progressive pop of the JeanMarie.

“I have faith that eventually the international respect being paid to the art scene will carry over to the music scene,” said Michael-John Hancock, the singer of ANR. He and his band mate, Brian Robertson, were among the first in a small wave of graduates of the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music to stay and make a stand as a band.

It may not seem surprising for a metropolitan area the size of South Florida to have a thriving rock scene. But Miami has never been a typical American city; as the joke goes, “It’s lovely, and so close to the U.S.” While Miami has countless dance clubs, there are very few establishments that support live local music. The city has long been a center of the Latin music industry, but Latin artists have trouble finding places to play too. Miami rappers like Rick Ross, Trina, DJ Khaled and Flo Rida have made “da Bottom,” as they call it, a major player in the world of hip-hop, but they’ve built their reps through strip clubs, mixtapes and cameos on other artists’ recordings.

For bands the city’s physical isolation presents obstacles. Whereas musicians in the Northeast can tour from one major city to another to build a regional fan base, for Miamians it’s about an 11-hour drive to Atlanta, the next musical mecca. “Geographically it’s a struggle to get out of South Florida,” Mr. Jeffries said.

And the transient nature of a city full of tourists and immigrants fosters a nightlife that’s built around partying. The music that D.J.’s spin in local clubs is heavily beat driven: hip-hop, techno, trance. Until recently, the primary outlet for the alternative crowd was the experimental electronic genre called intelligent dance music.

Fortunately for Miami rock fans there is Churchill’s. In 1979 David Daniels, an expat veteran of England’s northern soul scene, founded the club that — from its grotty interior to its Bowery-esque surroundings — is the CBGB of Miami. Mr. Daniels rents the adjacent space to Sweat Records, a store and coffeehouse whose owner, Lauren Reskin, is a funnel for information on the local art and music scene.

“Everything happens at Churchill’s,” Ms. Goodrich said. “It’s so real. It’s old and it’s magical, and there’s a lot of secrets there.”

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Jesse Jackson at Churchills Pub, is reminiscent of Tom Waits.Credit
Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times

Churchill’s has long been home to Miami’s small punk world. Over the last few years, in sojourns to other clubs like Luna Star Cafe in North Miami, as well as under his own roof, Mr. Daniels noticed that the most interesting sounds coming out of these musicians were acoustic. Young troubadours like the Tom Waits-esque Jesse Jackson were playing their songs as if it were 1960 and Miami were Greenwich Village. Mr. Daniels asked two of those musicians, Raffa Jo Harris and Rainer Davies, to host an open mike every Wednesday. In more than a year the series, Rock a Little Softer, has become an incubator for local talent. You might hear the echoes of Kate Bush in the strummed musings of Sharlyn Evertsz, Sol Ruiz’s neo-hippie soul, the wonderfully retro harmonies of Sirens & Sealions and always, Raffa & Rainer’s vintage-quality jazz folk.

As Rock a Little Softer has shown, a shortage of musical talent is not Miami’s problem. That’s why after living in multiple foreign cities, including London and Bogotá, Andrew (DJ Le Spam) Yeomanson, the leader of the Spam Allstars, has stayed here for 18 years.

“We have this great jazz school,” the Frost School of Music, “that is attracting a talent pool to our city,” Mr. Yeomanson, 38, said. “You have these young horn players that are out there and they’re hungry, they want experience, so there’s that to draw on on one side. And then there’s this incredibly diverse group of musicians that are coming from Latin America and especially Cuba, where you have this really high level of musicality and training. Plus there’s musical refugees from the Caribbean. Mix that with talented people that are already here, plus misfits like me who just show up, and you have a really interesting tapestry to draw from.”

Frost has acclaimed programs in jazz, classical, film scoring and engineering. In years past its students would return home or go to New York, Los Angeles, or at least Atlanta once they graduated. “If there wasn’t a scene or a beginning of a scene, U.M. students would just leave,” Ms. Harris, 27, said. “Now there are places to play, they stay.”

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Sweat Records, a store and coffehouse, is adjacent to Churchills.Credit
Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times

Graduates are helping to give the local scene what it needs most: infrastructure. Curtis Nystrom, 24, came to the University of Miami from Manhattan to study jazz. He fell in love with the city and decided to stay to play with his band the JeanMarie, and to run Hear Miami. Mr. Nystrom praises the galvanizing effect Art Basel has had on the city’s creative mind-set.

“It’s this electric city,” he said. “Especially right now you can feel it. The weather’s changing. You can start to feel people get motivated. You don’t only hang out with musicians, you hang out with artists and writers. For sure, the art scene has facilitated that cultural growth. I’d like to see it spread even more.”

In a former rag shop not far from Churchill’s is the most impressive testament to the changing nature of not just the Miami scene, but of the music industry in general. Mr. Scapa, a graduate of university’s advertising program, and J. Reade Fasse, who received his degree in engineering from Frost, opened Honor Roll a few months ago as a production house-record label-musician’s cooperative. They built six recording studios and hired a number of their old classmates including members of ANR, Airship and the Down Home Southernaires to score commercials and soundtracks and to record their own music. Honor Roll is like the Brill Building meets Sub Pop. “We’re old school,” Mr. Scapa said. “We’re developing the bands. This isn’t cookie-cutter pop. This is art that deserves a chance to be born and nurtured.”

In a sense Honor Roll finances its musicians’ art projects — their bands — by hiring them to do commercial work. The musicians say they are comfortable with churning out jingles in exchange for having their own studio to work in every day, free of charge.

Mr. Fasse and Mr. Scapa could have returned to their respective hometowns, Atlanta and Los Angeles, but they could never have afforded a space like the Honor Roll warehouse. Nor could they have made such a profound local impact. Likewise Ms. Goodrich is eager to hit the road and see the world, but she always wants to come home, to thrive on the ambience of a metropolis that is still rapidly becoming.

“I love being here,” she said. “It feels so free outside. I don’t have to put on a million things to get around. I enjoy the blue sky and the rain. I go to the beach. The colors here are amazing. And the characters down here. There’s a constant flow of people.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR20 of the New York edition with the headline: In South Florida, Tropical Bohemia In the Makings. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe